I admit I didn't bother to read this article on the subject, but my first thought on reading the summary was this:

So what the article is saying is that when young (presumably mostly male) people started to spend large amounts of their time pretty much alone in their homes, participating in essentially solo activities, as opposed to hanging around with their 'gang' mates outside in public places, the amount of violence they committed against others decreased...

Well, colour me shocked!

Now, personally, I strongly suspect that violence in media, in any visceral form, be that that computer games or tv / film, does desensitise the viewer to similar events in the real world. However, not only is that a seperate issue, it could easily be argued that this is as much a good thing as the reverse.

Indeed, if anything the remarkable thing about common sense is how remarkably uncommon it is.

Furthermore, since this is obvious from spending only a small amount of time with just about anyone you meet, this observation is common sense to me.

I disagree.

I misinterpreted nothing. No context was given.

However, you're quite correct that I was trying to make a point.

It's not clear to me what yours is, unless it's to get the record for the most posts under a single topic.

Why are you replying to me? My post was not in response to one of yours.

Irrespective, if someone says 1+1=2 I'd say that depends, at the very least, on which base you're using, and once the phrase "it depends" enters the equation you're back to the fact it's subjective. Denial doesn't change that fact!

Actually, 1 +1 = 10.

Subjective enough for you?

Actually, we are talking about online school bullying, along with all the other forms of antisocial behaviour that the act encompasses:

"Revisions to the interim guidelines were issued on 20 June 2013 ... The revisions specified that prosecutors should consider:

whether messages were aggravated by references to race, religion or other minorities, and whether they breached existing rules to counter harassment or stalking; and the age and maturity of any wrongdoer should be taken into account and given great weight."

Whether or not the CPS has actually, sucessfully or otherwise, prosecuted a school kid yet doesn't mean that they can't or won't. That they haven't suggests that a certain sense of perspective remains, for now at least.

To be honest, while you can attempt to spin this as a blow against civil liberties and freedom, if anything it strikes me as mostly political posturing: A politician appearing to get tough on crime. And, like it or not, we theoretically live in a democracy. If the majority of the population of the UK think this law is a good thing (and I stongly suspect that there will only be a small minority of people that think that punishing people for the behaviours described within the law is a bad thing) then it's actually his job to suggest and implement such a policy change.

It soothes my tired eyes
On screens of green; It speaks to me
In the quiet of the night

My code it doth record again
And me to type doth make
Within the paths of recursive loops
E’en for the program’s sake

Yea, though I work in a cubicle
Yet will I not use emacs
For vi is with me, and its colon
Efficiency it does not lack

My console it empowers me
In the presence of my foes
PHBs and HR drones
The source of all my woes

With Mountain Dew and salty snack
I can code, and sigh
How happy can one programmer be
As long as he uses vi :wq

As I understand it, the soil they started with had a fairly high organic matter content, compost basically, and this was broken down by microbial activity, absorbing oxygen, and releasing carbon dioxide. This CO2 was then, mostly, absorbed by the concrete in the structure's base, which was, at the time, an overlooked variable in the design of the enclosure, making the O2 reduction somewhat of a mystery. Like I said above, valuable information was gained from the 'experiment', even if what was learned was not what was originally intended as the object of study.

Once more I tend to agree with you, but with reservations. We'll never reach a stage of certainty that nothing will go wrong. To paraphrase, it's difficult to make things foolproof, because fools are so ingenious. There will always be an element of risk in any venture of this kind. At some point however someone has to say "We think we've thought of almost everything, and we think we've over-engineered the system and structure for everything we haven't thought of. Let's do this!"

I just want to emphasise, I do think we're essentially in agreement. To put it 'poetically', if you're going to sail the seas for the first time, then it is the "Cs" that you need to focus on: Consideration, Caution & Care.

I guess you're asking, perhaps rhetorically, about the "Biosphere 2" project in Arizona. The short answer is no, not on either attempt, but some useful information was gained, which has spurred further, and rather more scientific, investigations.

The first group in there (1991-1993), although they lasted out the full two years of the experiment, experienced several 'rule-breaking' issues including: One member had to briefly leave the facility to be taken to hospital due to chopping off the top of one of her fingers in a threshing machine; Towards the end of the experiment oxygen levels within the facility had fallen so low that extra oxygen had to be pumped in, essentially in order to stop the participants' suffering severe side effects, possibly including death; Near-starvation was also an issue for the participants, though, I confess, I'm not sure if additional food was actually shipped into the facility.

There were a number of other issues that caused problems, but weren't strictly 'rule-breaking' in that they (probably) didn't break the closed system, such as: Fluctuating carbon dioxide levels; 'Plagues' of insect pests, notably red ants iirc; A schism within the group of participants, which ended in an almost complete breakdown in relations between the resultant two groups, to the extent that members of neither group would so much as talk to a member of the other group.

The second attempt lasted a mere seven months, with issues ranging from internal sabotage to external legal complications lending a certain 'colour' to the proceedings.

The facility is still in use, now under the auspices of the University of Arizona, and is being used for a variety of experiments, though much of it is no longer sealed from the outside. It does look like some actual science is being done there now, as opposed to what amounted to the public spectacle that occurred previously, so hopefully some useful insights will eventually come out of it. However, since some of the experiments currently running have an expected lifespan of 10+ years I'm not expecting immediate 'results'.

I do generally agree with you, but, I don't think we should get too hung up on the idea of an enclosed system, as that's not actually what we live in, and very unlikely to be what we end up creating. In the case of Earth, as a whole, we have an energy input, from the sun and we also have matter input, from in-falling dust.
In the event that we do create a habitable environment off-planet then almost certainly we will continue to ship additional materials to that facility. The occupants of that facility will almost certainly gather and use materials (water, minerals, etc.) from outside their immediate sealed environment. And in the near(ish) future I can easily see us bringing in useful materials from space, such as rare metals from asteroids, water, even hydrogen from our local gas giant.

Over the millennia, mankind has expanded across the planet, into almost every environment, but now, other than the oceans and to a lesser degree the poles, we're running out of new places to go. The only question is whether we have the imagination to spur further, off-planet, expansion, and the public and political will to make that a reality.

Consider, I'm going to roll a 6 sided dice. What number am I going to roll?

Whatever your answer is, it's going to be wrong roughly 83% of the time, and your answer will differ from the actual roll by, on average, 1.9. The error factor in your answer amounts to nearly a third of the possible range of answers.

Now consider, I'm going to roll a 6 sided dice 1000 times. What will the average of all those rolls be?

I strongly suspect that your answer is going to be roughly 3.5. And, strangely, the correct answer is likely to be very very close to 3.5. It's unlikely to be exactly 3.5 of course, but the error factor in the answer is going to amount to fractions of a percent.

Well, I'm not totally taken by my attempt at an analogy, though I think it has some potential. I'll have to think on it some more.

I'm not sure I'm going to agree with this statement however. Is an apple a simpler fruit than an orange?

Informative? Not so much...

If you're going to go to all the effort to read the article, you might like to spend the extra 3 seconds to follow the linked reference (quoted in your post as [188]).

The article goes on to say:

You end with:

A headline has to be short, and unfortunately in that shortening some information is lost. Sure, it would have been more accurate to say "Europol reports that a security firm predicts the first online murder by the end of this year", but removing the bolded part strikes me as an acceptable precis of (that small section of) the article. Complaining that editors sensationalise headlines in order to encourage people to read the full article is akin to complaining that advertisements are designed solely to get you to buy a product. Well, duh!

As for lying, you're as guilty as a lie by ommission as they are of any lie by commission.

What?

Your weather forecasts are wrong every day? And in every conceivable way (Temperature, Cloud cover, Humidity, Rainfall, Windspeed, etc.)?

Honestly, that would be an achievement in itself!

Or, maybe, they get it right most of the time, but it's only the times they're wrong that stand out?

However, while I'm sure that both 'sides' in this debate are equally guilty of seeing what they want to see, that which confirms their observer bias, I'm not sure that ridiculing weather forecasts is a valid argument against the accuracy and predictive power (or lack thereof) of climate models.

This promises to be good...

Congratulations, you've turned your flying start of misunderstanding into a commanding lead of grammatical ignorance by committing the same type of apostrophic* error as the parent of the post you're replying to. And all that by the second line of your post. Just in case you're still confused as to what the hell I am referring to perhaps you'd care to note the usage of the other instances of your and you're in this paragraph.

Classic!

*Yeah, I might well have made this word up, but, damn me, if it doesn't seem to sum up the situation rather nicely.

I was under the impression that living in low to zero G for extended periods of time was exceedingly bad for human health, resulting in muscle wastage, loss in bone density, and impairment of the immune system.

In addition, it's far easier to provide protection from radiation on a planet than it is in space, at least it is until we're seriously exploiting space based resources such as asteroids.

As for the title of your post, well, it's easy to be disdainful of someone's dreams and ambitions. After all, the easiest way of "bigging yourself up" is to put someone else down. That says more about the person mouthing off though, than about the person being insulted.

Other than be a father, as opposed to simply fathering a child, as in provide a male role model to those who are born and grow up on Mars.

You might think that this is not important, respectfully I would disagree with you.